A blog about software delivery, Agile & DevOps by Mirco Hering

Tag Archives: conference

I spent the last 3 days at the DevOps Enterprise summit here in San Francisco and wanted to share my thoughts with those that couldn’t come over here. Overall it was a great conference, especially if you consider that this was the first time this conference was organised. A few glitches, but that just made it more likeable. And I am sure it will be even better next year. And I have to admit that I hope not hear about horses and unicorns for a few days…

So what did I take away from the conference? Here are a few of the themes that were pretty common through the 3 days:

DevOps Teams – While there were certainly exceptions (most notably from Barclays), most organisations that spoke seemed to have a dedicated shared services DevOps team to focus on the tooling, governance and support of their DevOps platform. This is certainly my preferred approach as well and it was good to see that many organisation have made positive experiences with this. But it was also good to hear positive stories from organisations that have chosen a more federated approaches and to learn how they approached it successfully.

DevOpsSec – While obvious in hindsight, the frequent mentioning of information security as a critical element in the DevOps journey really brought this home for me. And as some of the speakers highlighted the ability to automated the compliance to regulations and policies is so powerful, that information security can actually be your ally in the DevOps journey and not a blocker. Great change of perspective for me personally.

Balance of Culture and Technical Practices – Not surprisingly a lot was being said about culture change and also about technical practices for DevOps. I think this balance is important and is good for us to keep in mind in our day-to-day as we sometimes get to focussed on only one side of the equation.

Internal Conferences – So many companies use internal conferences to spread the word and share experiences across the organisation. This is fantastic to hear and I am glad they are able to get the support for it as it can be hard to make a quantifiable business case for those as I know from experience.

Servers are cattle not pets – A lot was being said about the importance of having environments that are commodity and consistent, so that you can replace servers easily and reliably. Quite a few of the tool vendors were from a server monitoring, configuration management drift detection space as well. This clearly deserves more focus going forward.

Tooling – A completely non scientific impression is that certain tools are much more prolific than others in the DevOps toolkit, examples are: Jenkins, Atlassian tools, Git.

Measuring everything – Not really a new thought, but interesting to see how many of the organisations had good data to support their story. So important to get this right and use it to drill down on bottlenecks and cost sources.

Scaled Agile Framework – SAFe got a lot of positive mentioning by the speakers, seems to be widely adopted at large enterprises.

A few smaller takeaways:

Impact Score of Releases – I like the idea of measuring the impact of releases by measuring the sum of (number of Defects x severity). Brilliant.

Inverse Taylor Manoeuvre – Such a good name for self-enabled teams

Inverse Conway Manoeuvre – A great name for addressing the architectural challenges that many of us face with existing architecture

Release notes as blog – Such a good idea to not send notes around but rather use a blog to document all release changes

Sprint Plan review meeting – A meeting after the sprint plan to get all relevant stakeholder across the plan (like Ops, InfoSec, Business). Great idea to test.

Favourite Quotes:

“Branches are evil”

“There is a right way to develop software (and DevOps is it)”

“We geeks don’t just like SkyNey – we want to build it”

“Cease dependence on mass inspection to achieve quality”

“Just talking nicely to each other does not delivery software”

“Time does not make software better”

A few things could be improved going forward in my opinion:

Many of the Enterprise Scale organisations were talking about their Web presence or Digital space, and only a few talked about the DevOps transformation for their Systems of Record. A better balance would be nice, to not only hear the positive stories and learn from the really difficult cases

One aspect that was only mentioned as a sidenote and by 2 or 3 speakers is the reality of working with many different vendors and systems integrators. How do you enable this multi-party setup for DevOps practices? Having been on both sides of that story, perhaps I should share my experiences next year…

The sessions were pretty much back-to-back and there was little time for Q&A and to ask informal questions. Perhaps a short break in between sessions or a more formal way to socialise with the speaker right after the session would be good. I have seen this very successful at other conferences.

And last but not least a shout-out to some of the outstanding speakers from the conference, if you get a chance check-out the recordings later in the week when they are available on the conference website at http://devopsenterprisesummit.com.
– Gary Gruver
– Em Campbell-Pretty
– Jason Cox
– Mark Schwarz
– Owen Gardner
– Carmen DeArdo
– to highlight just a few, there were many more that are worth listening to if you have the time